I Don't Care How Good You Are ... You Likely Aren't All That Special
Nor did you start off this good and the sooner we realize that the better off we will be as a profession.
There’s a photo circulating that stopped me mid-scroll. Orange wall. City street. Someone painted on it in big block letters:
“90% of jobs can be taught. Give people a chance.”
Scrolling LinkedIn, stuff like this comes up all the time. Every time, it gets me. It frustrates me to know. I always think, yeah but not procurement. We’d never allow that.
Some may not agree, and I’m open to being wrong but I wholeheartedly believe Procurement has a gatekeeping problem.
A serious one.
Quick Disclaimer… as a profession, we aren’t special. Everyone operates this way but I think it’s most avoidable in our realm.
We have built an entire interview infrastructure designed not to find great people, but to eliminate anyone who hasn’t already done the exact job we’re trying to hire for.
Which, if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, is insane.
Here’s the thing about hard skills: I can teach them.
Excel? I can teach that.
Negotiation tactics? Absolutely.
How to run a sourcing event, build a category strategy, read a contract, navigate an RFP process? All teachable.
All of it. Give me someone halfway motivated and I’ll have them fully functional in a couple months.
You know what I cannot teach?
How to be likeable...
Sure, I may sound like a jerk right now but it’s true.
I cannot teach you how to walk into a meeting and not make everyone in the room immediately regret being there.
I cannot teach you how to read a conversation, pick up on what’s not being said, and adjust accordingly on the fly.
I cannot teach emotional intelligence to someone who has spent so many years being completely unbothered by its absence.
I cannot teach… likability.
I cannot teach self-awareness to someone who has never once considered that they might be the problem.
And yet. When we post a job, what are we screening for?
A college degree. Five years of experience. Category management background preferred. Familiarity with Ariba, Coupa, and whatever platform we bought during COVID and never fully implemented. Must have managed suppliers in our industry, at our spend level, in our specific type of organization.
So let me tell you about a hire I made.
This guy had one employer for his entire adult career. Twenty-something years, same company, zero procurement experience. By every standard rubric we use in this profession, he should never have even gotten a callback. This would have been an easy auto screen out by even the most basic ATS tool.
I brought them in anyway.
Now, it’s worth noting that I did take some heat for this. He didn’t have a college degree. He didn’t look like a procurement candidate on paper. I had to put my rear end on the line to make this work.
Within two years, he had grown into the role in a way that made some of my more “experienced” hires look like they were still figuring out which way the building faced. Not because he was some kind of procurement prodigy. He wasn’t. And I’m certainly not some visionary leader who saw what others couldn’t…. or maybe I am - verdict is still out.
What he had was simpler than that. He listened.
Actually listened... not the kind of listening where you’re just waiting for your turn to talk. He learned without ego. He communicated clearly. He gave a genuine damn about the people on the other side of every conversation, whether that was a stakeholder, a supplier, or someone on the team.
That’s it. That was the whole thing. ...This is what should be in job descriptions but never will be…
I don’t think these are exotic qualities. They’re not rare gifts handed out to a lucky few. They’re just... not what we screen for. Because you can’t put them in a job description without sounding like a fortune cookie, you can’t verify them with a resume, and you can set up some ATS or AI tool to weed out “the disqualified” based on keywords.
So, instead we ask for five years of category experience and pat ourselves on the back for being rigorous. Check the box and move on.
The best procurement people I’ve worked with came in sideways and typically by accident. They slide in from Finance or Legal. Some came from the dark side… the vendor side. This guy,… from one employer for twenty years outside of anything that even resembled procurement and contracting. They all figured it out because they were curious, coachable, and, the most critical element, people actually wanted to work with them.
That last part matters more than we admit.
Procurement is a relationship function dressed up in spreadsheets. No matter how pretty you look in your sheets... People need to like you or nobody is going to bother with you and your sheets. You can have perfect process discipline and be completely useless if no one trusts you, no one wants to call you, and every stakeholder you touch is quietly routing around you.
Moral of the story… hire for the thing you can’t fix and teach the rest.
Have a good story about a hire that doesn’t fit the typical mold? Share it with the world. Let’s make Procurement more accessible to quality candidates!